Exploring the Relationship between Service Quality of Private Hospitals and Patient Loyalty from the Perspective of Health Service

Abstract

Background: With increasing demands for medical treatment and healthcare, private hospitals have enjoyed rapid development, and the quality and satisfaction ratings of their medical services have gradually become hotspot issues. We aimed to investigate the influencing mechanisms of medical service quality, patient perceived value, patient satisfaction, and patient loyalty.
 Methods: On the basis of improved patient perceived value, service satisfaction, and loyalty scales, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 300 patients in 15 private hospitals in China. The action mechanisms of medical service quality, patient perceived value, patient satisfaction, and patient loyalty were verified via SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 20.0 statistical software.
 Results: The service quality of private hospitals was positively correlated with patient perceived value, patient satisfaction and patient loyalty. Patient perceived value was positively correlated with patient satisfaction. Patient perceived value, as well as patient satisfaction was positively correlated with patient loyalty. Patient perceived value and patient satisfaction play a mediating role between medical service quality and patient loyalty. Patient perceived value and patient satisfaction play a chain mediating role between medical service quality and patient loyalty.
 Conclusion: 1) Improving medical service quality is the main path to acquire patient loyalty for private hospitals. 2) When accepting high-quality medical services, patients will think that the cost paid is reasonable, and their satisfaction with private hospitals will consequently increase. 3) As patient satisfaction with private hospitals is elevated to a certain degree, they become increasingly willing to choose these hospitals again and recommend them to others.

The Effect of Quality Care on Patient Loyalty Mediated with Patient Satisfaction and Moderated by Age and Gender (Study in Outpatients at a Private Hospital)

“…Female patients have a lower perception of health than men. Also, they have lower satisfaction with health services than male patients (Guo, Zhou, Xing, & Li, 2020;Okunrintemi et al, 2018). This indicates that demographic factors should not be neglected as age and gender are related to patient conditions and influence their expectations and satisfaction.…”

“…Quality care indicators are adopted from Donabedian (1988) and Andaleeb (2001) stating that quality consists of technical quality (clinical) and functional quality (non-clinical) (Abbasi-Moghaddam, Zarei, Bagherzadeh, Dargahi, & Farrokhi 2019;Camilleri & O'Calaghan, 1998;Johnson et al, 2016;Prakash & Srivastava, 2019). Secondly, age and gender as the moderating variable were tested on the path toward patient loyalty (Bener & Ghuloum, 2013;Guo et al, 2020;Okunrintemi et al, 2018;Walsh, Evanschitzky, & Wunderlich, 2008;Wang, Chen, Burström, & Burström, 2019). Thirdly, this paper employed the PLS predict calculation, the advanced method of PLS-SEM to assess the prediction power of the model.…”

“…However, the satisfaction degree can be influenced by their age and gender. These factors need to be a concern in increasing patient satisfaction (Guo et al, 2020;Okunrintemi et al, 2018). High patient satisfaction increases revisits and will patient loyalty.…”

“…Loyalty in the medical field is assessed based on patient willingness to recognize the service as the first choice, revisit the hospital, and/or recommend the hospital facility to others. (Guo et al, 2020;Kim et al, 2017;Zhou, Wan, Liu, Feng, & Shang, 2017). In the world of business and marketing, loyalty gives great benefits.…”

“…Patient satisfaction has positive direct effects on patient loyalty which is described as revisit intention (Asnawi et al, 2019;Guo et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2017). The formulated hypothesis is: H3: There is a positive effect of patient satisfaction on patient loyalty.…”